Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[discoursedrome]

Reflecting a bit more on the “Death: Woke or Joke?” topic, I guesspart of the gap is that the people who feel strongly about eliminating death see it as a major source of surd evil, whereas it just doesn’t seem to me like very much suffering comes from mere fact of death so much as the particulars.

It seems to me that the bulk of the suffering caused by death is the result of prolonged and unpleasant deaths, which can largely be addressed with euthanasia, or else it’s either a matter death being used as coercion and punishment (which I expect would get worse in a world with indefinite lifespan) or of large numbers of people dying at once from the same thing (which isn’t something I would expect most death-cheating technology to help with). From where I stand it looks like nearly all suffering is caused by what I would call “samsaric” issues – competition over limited resources, Red Queen’s races, and incentive structures that make suffering beneficial to us, or make it beneficial for us to make others suffer. It seems more likely that technology that permitted indefinite lifespan would make all of those problems worse than that it would ameliorate them, though the exact way this is likely to happen would vary greatly depending on how the tech worked.

[mitigatedchaos]

If you use that as a moral principle, though, you can justify almost arbitrarily-short lifespans.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

JUST ANOTHER DAY LIVING IN PART AND PARCEL LONDON

[mitigatedchaos]

Had to check the date on that. Apparently this happened outside of a mosque. No word on whether it’s sectarian or if it’s “revenge” for previous truck attacks by Muslims.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

All the NTSB recommendations are technically trade offs that have costs; consider American Airlines Flight 191 which crashed on take off killing everyone on board and two people on the ground after an engine separated from the wing due to improper maintenance procedures had cracked the pylon.

While 273 people may have died, the improper shortcuts taken during engine maintenance saved 200 man hours per aircraft! Why, the meddling FAA banning this procedure may have done more harm than the original crash!

[mitigatedchaos]

Nah it’s alright fam,

If we assume that the GDP per capita is $55,000, and that the typical passenger has 35 working years remaining, we can just have the state bill the company and its shareholders $525,525,000 and put them into debt bondage and sell off their assets if they are unwilling or unable to pay.

Now you may object to the state rolling around and charging huge sums of money as payment for accidental deaths, but I have it on good authority that everyone signed over their trusteeship to the state rather than get kicked into the ocean, entirely of their own free will.  Quite remarkable, really.  So I assure that this plan is entirely Capitalist.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Like, the obvious question is: will the price you’re willing to pay be a price you can pay? The institutions of society (including authoritarian restrictions on reproduction, if any) are going to be designed for the service of the most powerful, and agelessness will considerably widen the gap between the most and least powerful (a stricter immortality such as through hand-waving “backup” technology is actually even worse).

There’s little reason to think that there is a fundamental physical cost that is highly expensive, like with flying cars.  

The rules for agelessness cannot openly be designed so that only the wealthy benefit because people have accepted democratic principles.  They’ll revolt if that happens.  The powerful will have to make concessions whether they like it or not.  

and the “being dead is terrible in principle” element is unconvincing to me simply because we’re all still going to die in an ageless world, or even an “immortal” one, and it’s not at all clear that we’d even die later than we would in this world.

Considering that the world is still getting safer overall, I’m not sure how reasonable that projection really is.

Additionally, postponing death by 10 or 50 or 100 years is still a very big deal, and here you’re treating it like “well you’re still going to die eventually, so it’s irrelevant.” Like another 50 years to know your loved ones or fulfill your potential (with things like art) is irrelevant.

and there’s a good chance that the quality of life we’d have in that world would be drastically worse overall, because society is made for the powerful and on average the powerful now live 100 times longer than everybody else and that will have really significant effects on how society, law, and work are structured.

Your argument hinges on this, but I feel it’s overstated and don’t find it compelling.

How hard would people be willing to fight if they knew it meant a lot more than just their ordinary limited lifespan?

And how do the powerful justify and maintain their power?

Political support for things like basic income are growing.  If there is a big wave of mass displacement by automation, I think it will even go through, even though it would have been unthinkable ten years ago.  The reason people aren’t thinking about these problems in the mainstream is that the technology doesn’t seem plausible yet.  The political landscape will change as it does.

In other words, I expect the boring liberal democracies to essentially remain as such, with some set of politically-palatable compromise solutions.  Some of the elites will even believe these solutions are good ideas.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Well yes, the economic argument isn’t the strongest one.  The strongest argument is that the alternative is becoming weak, helpless, and mad, followed by literal involuntary permanent nonexistence.  There are very few arguments that would convince me that we should not develop immortality technology when I have a metaphorical gun to my head that can only be moved farther back by immortality technology.

You don’t find the economic argument compelling, I don’t find “really, death isn’t that bad” plus all the other arguments compelling.  The price I am willing to pay for this technology is very high.  My enjoyment of the future beyond the end of my lifespan is literally zero or null if it is not developed.  

That price includes authoritarian restrictions on reproduction.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[testblogdontupvote]

I can on conscious level sort of understand that some people aren’t bothered by the fact that they’re gonna die, and can even sort of understand their reasoning (and I do believe in the right of people to make choices that I consider to be shitty), but on the intuitive level this is just incomprehensible for me. But then I remember that there are plenty of women who don’t just totally buy the idea that only young attractive thin women have value and deserve respect, and everyone else must be constantly shamed into “knowing their place,” but also enthusiastically and aggressively perpetuate it. That is despite the fact they’re basically guaranteed to sooner or later enter the category of people they worthless and deserving shame. And presumably the project of stopping appearance-based shaming or at least changing your own beliefs and finding yourself an accepting community is easier than eradicating death. So defending mortality makes at least as much sense - if not more - than defending old-unattractive-shaming, and evidently people can be extremely enthusiastic about the latter.

[discoursedrome]

I’m definitely in the “death is preferable to no-death” camp, and while I can’t speak for others, I can maybe do a bit to try to explain my own position. The first thing I should emphasize is that “not being bothered by the prospect of your own death" and “in favour of mortality as a thing” are not as tightly coupled as you’re probably supposing. As with many issues, it’s often necessary to separate large-scale social policy from personal interests. It’s also important to distinguish between death by accident, trauma, or illness and death by aging, because they’re very different things. I don’t know anyone who’s against eliminating the former, but a lot of people (including me) are wary of tinkering with senescence. Futurist critics tend to frame this as a kind of superstitious nature worship, a slavish fixation on the moral supremacy of What Is, but I find that dismissal a bit too pat.

(cut bc long)

[mitigatedchaos]

There’s more to it, but you even if you set aside the fact that not dying is actually very, very valuable, you also have to account for the disadvantages of the current system.

For instance, it is extraordinarily expensive to raise an entire generation of people, during which time they can’t really be part of the workforce without compromising their later effectiveness, have them work for a limited time as their bodies and minds slowly degrade, spend even more money as their bodies start to fall apart all at once, then discard them and bury their bodies.

Then we do it all over again.  Only it’s worse, because they have to spend one quarter of their lifespan raising children to keep this going.  This not only limits investment in children, but limits time in the workforce.

The stickiness of scientific theories might be related to health degradation and loss of neuroplasticity over time.  

As for social change, I’m not sure that more is always better.  We’re still wrestling with changes in incentives from the sexual revolution, and while LGBTs are only a small fraction of the population and were never a threat to society to begin with, polygamy has a lot more practical trouble associated with it (like decreases in the psychological health of women and children, and incentives that lead to very early or even child marriage) and is probably next on the Progressive schedule after Transgenderism, even though normalizing polygamy is probably not a good idea.  (It’s different when it’s just a few nerds doing it.)